Horror
The horror in You Weren’t Meant to Be Human isn’t just the worms-and-flies stuff, though that is properly nasty. What stayed with me was the pressure of it all, that crawling sense of being trapped in a place that’s already rotting around you.
The Appalachian setting does a lot of the heavy lifting too. It feels oppressive before anything even starts moving. That’s the kind of horror I tend to remember longest. Not the loud shocks, but the atmosphere that keeps following you after the page is closed.
The Appalachian setting does a lot of the heavy lifting too. It feels oppressive before anything even starts moving. That’s the kind of horror I tend to remember longest. Not the loud shocks, but the atmosphere that keeps following you after the page is closed.
That kind of setting can tip a book from unsettling into something I actively want to hide in a cupboard. The Appalachia angle is doing a lot of work for me here, because it suggests the rot is social and historical as well as bodily. That’s usually where horror sticks. I’m more interested in that slow contamination than in pure gross-out, honestly.